


indecision

by iimpavid



Series: original works, collected [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Curses, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Magic, Monsters, Queer Characters, Queer Utopia, Regency Aesthetics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22088074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: The anxious son of a merchant is cursed with indecision and gets lost in the woods.
Series: original works, collected [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1037567
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	indecision

It was a moonless night and a warm one at that. Simon focused clearly on that fact while his parents’ voices washed over him. 

Nine esteemed personages sat around a broad glass-mosaic table in the Holloway estate’s pavilion-- if he were to count himself and his parents as esteemed. Located at the western edge of the gardens, on the top of a hill, the pavilion was the best setting for watching the slow progress of lamplights throughout the town of Greywatch below. Certainly Dr. and Mr. Lewis were taken with the wave of soft-flickering lights; their daughter, Sable, was something of a poet and noted, “They’re like fireflies drifting out over the sea.” 

_Never mind the fact that fireflies shun the coast_ , Simon thought uncharitably -- he had never seen fireflies anywhere near Oxglen’s docks. Discomfort was written into his very posture, ramrod straight in the plum dinner jacket his mother had insisted he wear because it would compliment his eyes.

Mr. Bisset, Esq. and his wife and his son, Guillaume, were not quite so taken with the natural sights. The whole family, it seemed, was struck with terrible allergies brought on by the early spring blooms and not one of the three of them looked up from their handkerchiefs the entire meal.

All at once Simon became aware that a silence had settled over the company. His mother had fixed him with a polite smile. 

It was the one that drew her eyes tight and showed a little too much of her teeth. The one that meant he had taken far too long to acknowledge some question or comment posed to him. Something said by Miss Sable Lewis and Mister Guillaume Bisset or, gods forbid, their parents. Honored guests who had come all the way out to the Holloway estate to enjoy this lovely dinner his mother had painstakingly arranged in the Holloway estate’s garden — staff hired for the evening, expensive food bought from the coast. All so that Sable and Guillaume could to get to know _him_ at his parents’ generous insistence. They had decided, without consulting him on the matter, that he should have some choice in his future spouse.

Simon stuttered. Felt himself flush then go pale.

He pushed away from the table. His parents expected him to pick and court one of the two fine young people they’d selected for him. He was going to be sick. He had to leave.

“I’m so sorry; please, you must excuse me for just a moment.” He turned on his heel and stumbled away from the gazebo. 

* * *

What could be said of Simon Holloway? 

He was a bright young man with an uncertain future, despite the path laid neatly before his feet. He came from a good family. An old family, one that deserved a son willing and able to carry its legacy. He studied Philosophy at Oxglen, leaving the Holloway Estate in Greywatch far behind to pursue the discipline that, on his first day in the city, an acquaintance had told him might suit him. He’d wanted out of Greywatch. At the time it was a fair enough excuse to leave the quiet of the country and over the years he had simply settled into the pattern of it and couldn’t now change course.

True to form for young men of his kind-- tragically unmarried heirs to fortunes carrying the weight of their families’ hopes and no spare siblings to pick up the slack-- he kept truly scandalous company. Chief among his compatriots was Winifred “Freddie” Walton. Freddie had set her mind to becoming Estea’s first woman solicitor when she was a young girl and made good on that promise now. She did a fabulous job of upsetting all her classmates and professors at Oxglen’s esteemed judicial college with her propensity for carrying men’s watches and winning arguments with flawless syllogisms and rhetoric. When Simon was not in her company or carousing or studying he was likely to be found hidden away in his flat, refusing all callers, pacing the boards in his bed jacket and fretting. 

Fretting was something of a pastime for him. A compulsion. 

What he fretted over changed by the hour: a paper on the morality of industrialized production; how best to go about letting his latest paramour down gently; what color waistcoat to wear to his next theater date; when was too early to arrive at a meeting with his mentor; how to dodge his mother’s questions about his need to marry; whether or not to carry an umbrella on a cloudy day; which argument was to best refute his father’s disdain of philosophy. The list was as varied as it was long. On almost any subject that a person could be expected to form an opinion or make a choice, Simon was utterly bereft.

And while his favorite pastime was inconceivably dull... while Miss Walton was decidedly scandalous company for him to keep… he still somehow managed to make further ruin of his reputation. On the evenings when Simon found himself unable to stand the fretting and Freddie could not be bothered to leave her studies, Simon kept company that could only be called “reprehensible”.

Simon was a boxer. 

Not the sort from posters and well-lit halls but the sort who found himself half-drunk and shirtless, facing fighters a head taller than himself who would be more than glad to lay him out on the sawdusted boards of whatever basement the gambling gaggle found worthy of their sport. Dim dens of iniquity smelling of blood, vomit, and cigars, whose ovens might be used for food or for the disposal of losers whose luck was too poor to allow them to get back up again. 

At the start, during his first winter at Oxglen, he had lost almost every single round. That he picked himself up from the floor, bleeding and swollen and weeping, was a miracle in itself; the den manager who oversaw the bets had several marks on the theory that Simon’s head was made of solid lead. 

Then he had learned something life changing: the mind and body could be, after a fashion, through sufficient willpower, treated as if they were separate.

His subsequent article on “dualism” won him six months’ rent and he didn’t lose a single match after. After all, there was nothing to fret over in the boxing ring, no consequences to muddle through. Only the very simple mathematics of a body demanding the chance to go on living.

* * *

“I’m so sorry; please, you must excuse me for just a moment.”

Harold, the first footman of the household, followed him out onto the twisting garden path and put a gentle hand on his elbow. “Master Holloway, the grounds’ water closet it the other way.”

Safely down the side of the hill and out of sight of the gazebo, Simon shook Harold off. “No, thank you, Harold. I only need to clear my head.” Without warning or ceremony he shoved himself through the hedgerow that marked the boundary of the garden and the farmland beyond. 

The hedge swallowed up Harold’s cry of surprise. Simon nearly strangled himself when his cravat caught on a branch until he could manage to disentangle himself from the wretched thing. He left it, and plum his dinner jacket too, in the hedge’s depths, emerging with fronds caught in his curls and bleeding scratches on his palms.

He started out innocently enough. One might even have considered his gait controlled as he walked at a brisk pace through the night, breathing hard as his head spun with possibilities and prospects.

Both the suitors his parents selected were ideal matches as far as securing the estate’s and the Holloway Shipping Company’s future— and his own inheritance— was concerned. Miss Lewis wanted children, outside of her poetry they were her favorite subject, and Mr. Bisset’s family sponsored an orphanage in Oxglen so adoption would come easily. Both families were of modern fortune but had histories of sound business decisions and were in good social standing. Mr. Bisset the elder had advised the High Council on matters of international trade law. Dr. Lewis had attended the Queen Regent in his prime. But Miss Lewis’ poetry set his teeth on edge. The younger Mr. Bisset’s allergies caused constant sniffles that were singularly annoying. He had heard no rumors of either of them at social gatherings in Oxglen and so it could be assumed that the lives they led were of the unobtrusive, boring sort. Neither of them was hard on the eyes, either. His parents had accounted for everything. 

Simon stopped. He tried to breathe. Unbuttoned his shirt and waistcoat and planted his hands on his hips to keep his chest open. 

It did him no good. His heart was going to burst out of his chest. 

The stars stared coldly down at him. A nightbird called in the distance. Fireflies sparked and faded throughout the waist-high grasses. They were oblivious to his crisis.

Simon considered the needs of his body: it was an animal, all current science said so, and that animal was presently in a state of increasing terror that showed no signs of abating. 

Put more simply: the animal of his body wanted, desperately, to live.

Without a gesture of warning he broke into a run for his life.

These fields belonged to a farmer whose specialty was whistlegrass for baskets and specialty ropes and, as he sprinted, Simon stirred the drying stalks into a flurry of floating seeds. There was no moonlight to set the seeds glittering but their low music rose around him while his strides kept a fast and sure tempo.

A wind rose at his back, firm and cool and urging him onward. Fireflies jerked and stuttered out of his path. They left afterimages glittering in his eyes. Between them he could see nothing in the dark.

He ran without destination, spurred farther and faster to outpace his thoughts.

The forest swallowed him whole without either of them noticing; the only change was the sound. From the humming crash of running through whistlegrass now his every step was muted except for those odd instances where he snapped some twig or bounded over some root or beneath a branch. His own harsh breaths rasped in his ears. 

It was a fallen tree that did him in. 

He ran straight into it— and then tumbled upside down over it. Ass over teakettle in the murmuring dark.

Simon groaned a pitiful noise into the dirt.

There was a burning sensation up his right shin that told him he’d not only torn his trousers but bloodied the skin underneath. That was to say nothing of the shoulder he’d landed on and the terrible ache in his head that would no doubt come by morning. It’s a small boon that no one was around to see him else he might count his pride among his injuries.

His shirt stuck to his back and chest with sweat. He could only imagine how furious his laundress would be at the prospect of getting the stains out of it. She didn’t mind when he gave her something bloody but she scolded him endlessly for mud or oil or ink.

He sat up. 

His body was a beehive, for all the buzzing it was doing, every breath filling him from his toes to the top of his head. The log made a terrible backrest but he leaned against it anyway. He was pleasurably exhausted by his run and too delighted at existing to bother with trying to make his way home. 

Then, all at once with the cruelty of a wind in winter the drifting warmth came crashing down. Shame overcame him. His parents had put on a magnificent dinner and he had, quite literally, run away. Like a child. Because he couldn’t stand the thought of marrying. Or, more accurately and even worse, he was physically incapable of even stating a preference about whom he might want to marry, possibly, some day.

Simon groaned again in an entirely different kind of pain.

* * *

“Quit whining! It’s just clothes and it’s just a date!” 

Winifred Walton stood over Simon where he had sprawled, face-down, onto the cushion-laden, oversized divan that served as his bed. He lifted his head from his pillow, soft brown curls flopping into his eyes. “You don’t _understand_ , Freddie!” 

She put her hands on her hips. They were impressive hips, full and soft and decorated in the latest trend; cameos were in fashion once more this season, especially the genuine antiques to be collected polished to glittering shine. Freddie boasted a dozen of them strung on her fine leather belt, collected from friends and romantic liaisons alike. Where she found the time between her work and her studies Simon didn’t understand in the slightest. She glared at him. “No, I don’t, so please, enlighten me, oh, philosopher!” 

Simon rolled onto his back, displacing half the pillows in a cascade onto the floor. Staring up at the ceiling he told her, “It’s not as simple as you make it out to be, deciding what to wear. There are so many things to consider, the weather, what we’re going to do, if we’ll go dancing after—” 

“It is, _too_ , simple— you just put on what you like! Especially when a beautiful young person like Mx. Coleridge invites you to _their private box at the Metropolitan Opera_!” 

“ _I don’t know what I like, Freddie_! I just— I buy what the people in shops tell me to, really, or what’s on sale, or what’s new— who has the time to make choices about that kind of thing?” 

They had been friends for less than a year but this expression of Simon’s was already familiar: a deep worry that would have him canceling plans into the next week just to get a grip on himself. Freddie wasn’t terribly gentle as a rule but she felt great sympathy for him. Before coming to Oxglen she’d worried about just as much about what she wore. Her hair style, what jewelry was in fashion— tedious things necessary for a marriage match that, thankfully, no one gave a damn about when practicing law. She wanted very much for Simon to free himself of those same vain concerns but it was like pulling an alligator’s teeth.

She made her way back to his wardrobe. And his traveling trunk. And a few more trunks besides. His bedroom was mostly composed of clothing storage that was entirely overstuffed with all manner of passing fads without any coherence of style, cut, or color. She wondered with a flush of pity that he must be completely colorblind— and have never had his mother tell him how to dress, either, which she’d found was not altogether uncommon in certain classes.

“I have a very radical proposition for you, Simon,” she said, suddenly very serious, “and it’s a terrible thing for me to say to a newly-minted friend but I implore you to trust me. If I were not your friend I wouldn’t care half so much as I do about this.” 

“What in the world are you talking about?” He sat up halfway just to frown at her in confusion.

“Nothing in your wardrobe works together,” she told him. 

He flopped back onto his divan, dejected. “I know!” 

“I’m going to throw out everything that’s too out of date and too hideous to be seen by polite society.” 

“What!” 

“Only,” she added, holding up a hand to silence him, “if it has no sentimental value. And once I’m done, you should be able to get dressed in the dark and make a presentable picture.” 

He was skeptical. “I don’t know that I have any sentimental clothes.” 

“Then this will be even easier!” 

“How does that help me with what to wear tonight?” 

“Oh, _that_ ,” she pursed her lips and considered the trunk piled with clothes before her. She dove into it and began throwing items at him— trousers, a balled pair of stockings, shirt, a velvet waistcoat. “There. That should be a decent outfit for tonight; we’ll deal with jewelry once you’re dressed. Then you can go make wild and unabashed love to Mx. Coleridge and I’ll fix… _this_.” 

“You don’t have to do this,” he began, chagrined.

“Of course not; I don’t want to read up on 7th century agrarian property exchange and this is the only available distraction.” 

“Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Nothing I’ve found yet.”

* * *

_Fireflies don’t belong on the ground_ , Simon thought. Yet despite his incredulity a line of insects, gleaming gold in the night and chittering amongst themselves, marched stolidly an inch from his nose. 

Simon sat up, shocked to have been dozing on the forest floor. The line of beetles— in the minuscule light of their own wing casings’ glow he could see that they were indeed beetles and not fireflies of any sort— continued their trek without regard for him. There must have been a thousand of them. They skittered smoothly over the log at his back and in a diagonal across his thigh to chest before climbing down to the forest floor again. The weight of them barely registered through his clothes but he felt very sure that he should not disturb them. 

The muffled night music remained unbroken, no baying hounds or calling servants or any of the kerfuffle he’d expected to arise once Harold reported him thoroughly lost. And he _was_ thoroughly lost. And completely alone.

The woods were curious. 

Which is to say that he felt keenly that every root, leaf, rock, and insect was attending to him with a slow and inhuman intelligence that was not accustomed to guests.

It was a heavy regard but not an unkind one. He shivered beneath the weight of it.

He reached down and set his hand to stop beetles climbing on his torso. They all stopped, forming a line up against his palm, antennae tracing the air frantically. Those on the other side of his little barrier only went so far as to leave his body before they stopped, too, as if they were waiting. 

“I don’t want to hurt any of you,” he whispered because whispering seemed to be the most appropriate volume for this situation. He had no idea what else might be in the dark but it couldn’t _all_ be so pleasant to see as glowing gold beetles. “If you’ll let me pick you up,” he told them, absurdly convinced they might understand, “I’ll get out of your way and set you down. I’ll be very careful.” 

All at once the beetles standing on him rushed to cling to his hand-- and then to each other when there proved to be too many of them— he flailed a moment and found himself holding some two dozen of the broad, squat insects piled between his palms. They shifted a little against his skin but didn’t jostle, patiently stacked on each other. Waiting. He rolled to kneel beside their compatriots. When he opened his cupped hands they boiled out from his fingers in a tickling wave, weaving their way to and fro until they were back, it seemed, in their original positions— then their procession began again. 

Dizzy with fatigue and aching from his fresh bruises and scrapes, he didn’t think twice about following them. It was stupid but, since he had had no path home to begin with, it was far from the stupidest thing he’d _ever_ done. There weren’t twenty miles between the estate’s side of the Greywatch wood to the far side at its widest point— if worse came to worst he would only have a few days’ worth of wandering to do if he stuck to one direction.

He couldn’t rationalize it any better than that as he shuffled beside them. He couldn’t see the front or end of the shining line across the forest floor. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

* * *

The beetles made their long way only veering around trees— everything they climbed over or through and so Simon clambered over boulders and stepped clumsily over muddy streams and altogether looked a fool in his desire to keep from losing them.

Together the beetles and Simon followed, more or less, the path of that stream until their course finished in an alder grove that grew in a perfect circle. The insects scattered at its border, wending their way through luminescent mosses carpeting the floor of the grove. At the center of the grove a spring bubbled and seemed to be laughing at some joke it wasn’t inclined to share. Beside it grew a tree. In the dim glow, the great, crooked line of it seemed to be a person bent to peer into the black water.

Simon had grown up hunting these woods but never seen this place before.

A sense that something was deeply amiss arose in him as the shadowy figure of the tree drew itself to full height and then stalked toward him. It walked with uncanny smoothness of gait.

Simon shuffled a step backward, half turned, and froze there with his foot midair. Beetles still flooded into the grove from behind him and too hasty a step would mean crushing them. He hesitated and a beetle flew, chittering, into his face... and landed on his cheek. He jerked back, overbalancing with a cry of dismay— 

But before he went sprawling, before he could crush the little insects swarming the ground beneath him, a hand caught him, twisting in the fabric of his waistcoat… and held him there, leaning stiff and balanced just so like a gangplank.

The tree wasn’t a tree, clearly, despite being lit only by the foliage and the compromising angle Simon could see that much. They were something like a person. Sharp features in the suggestion of a face pressing out from smooth bark. A mouth crowded with thorny teeth. Deep set hollows and black eyes that gleamed. With a gusting sigh they raised a many-jointed hand to pluck the beetle from his cheek. Their cool fingertips rasped on his skin like sandpaper.

Simon got his feet under him and tried to pull away but they did not let him go. They held the beetle between their thumb and forefinger and the beetle clattered and clacked in protest and the tree thrummed back. Low and _loud_.

He was wracked, suddenly, by a fear that they would eat the beetle. Those teeth were so sharp and the beetle so small. “Don’t hurt it!” He reached for the beetle and the tree held it farther away from his grasping fingers.

The tree— they weren’t a tree, obviously, but Simon didn’t know how else to think of them— looked down at him and after an agonizing pause pushed Simon upright.

“We are arguing,” they told him, each word painstakingly enunciated from the middle of their throat. Their hand was still on his chest. Broad and clawed and motionless. 

“Ah, right,” Simon said, staring up at them. “Um. What about?” 

“ _You_.” 

They released the beetle. It hovered midair a moment then buzzed back to Simon, landing in his hair. Goosebumps broke out over his skin. He felt the beetle settle in and was tempted, terribly, to rake it out with his fingers. 

“You shouldn’t be able to come here,” they told him. 

“I just followed the beetles?” Simon swallowed. Hemmed in by beetles he couldn’t bring himself to step on and completely out of his depth he was edging toward a terrible anxiety. “I’m afraid I— I seem to be lost.” 

“Beetles?” They frowned, he was sure of it, the wells of their eyes narrowing. They didn’t share his nervous laughter.

“Well at first I thought they were fireflies but they’re, they’re a bit big for that, aren’t they?”

They drew away from him, fluid in their movements like a young willow swaying with a storm. They muttered as they went, the same humming they had made while arguing with the beetle marked through with creaking snaps. 

The beetle in Simon’s hair crawled down the back of his head and just as it touched the nape of his neck he grabbed it, caging it as gingerly as he could in his fingers. “No! You _cannot_. No.” He shuddered uncontrollably. He carefully brought the beetle around to talk to it. This one was double the size of the others and filled his palm. “I can tolerate a lot but you can’t go crawling under my clothes,” he told it.

It fluttered its wing casings against his fingers. They felt soft as flowing water. 

He slowly opened his palm and the beetle, continuing to show its sensible nature, climbed up onto his sleeve and hung there, grasping a fold of fabric in its delicate jaws.

Then the feral tree— the extraordinary entity watching over the spring, the fae creature whose realm Simon had stumbled into— called to him. “Come, I will see you to your… home.” 

Relief washed over him. “If you would please,” he accepted without question, “I would be most grateful. I thought to myself I might walk out once morning came but this will be much faster! Although I must ask— what should I call you?” 

A baffled silence settled between them before the tree answered answered, “Your mind will not hold my name.”

There was no conceivable response to that but Simon’s mother and governess didn’t raise him to be rude. “It’s...ah… It’s a pleasure to meet you all the same. _My_ name is Simon Holloway. I have to say I’m embarrassed to have found myself in this situation; your hospitality is an unlooked for blessing.” 

They were already walking away from him. “This way.” 

He hurried after them, watching the ground to hop over the odd beetle skittering across his path.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little snippet of something I might someday finish (like everything else I post here). Check out my other original content in this series, such as it is, if you like what I make.


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